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“I don’t want to be static,” I say, looking into his face.
“Neither do I,” Dean agrees.
It’s the first calm conversation we’ve had together in a week.
I expect Dean to start pressing me to forgive him again, but instead he simply holds out his hand for my bookbag, so he can carry it for me.
“It’s alright, I’ve got it,” I say.
I sling the bag over my shoulder and offer him my hand instead.
My fingers slip inside his, warm and natural and comforting.
We walk to class hand in hand, over fresh grass with the first buds of purple clover coming up. The breeze from the fields outside the castle walls smells of spring.
Now that Dean is finally staying quiet, not pushing me for conversation, there’s a hundred things I want to say to him.
He walks with his long strides carefully matching my pace. He’s been right beside me this whole school year, one way or another.
We reach the Keep. I’m supposed to go up to the third floor, and I know Dean has his boxing class over in the Armory.
All of a sudden, I don’t want to part, not even for an hour.
I clutch his hand, looking up into his face.
Dean smiles down at me.
“I’ll be right out here waiting for you,” he says.
But when I come out of the classroom after Chemistry, Dean is nowhere to be seen.
28
DEAN
As I’m walking from the Keep to the Armory, two hulking groundskeepers step out of the shadows of the Grand Hall and flank me, one on either side.
The Kingmakers staff are all ex-soldiers, ex-mercenaries, combat-trained and mafia-initiated. Their daily tasks may involve menial activities such as tending to the greenhouses and building the infrastructure for theQuartum Bellumchallenges, but at the end of the day they’re here for security purposes.
Like a stag encircled by wolves, I have the instinctive impulse to fight or run.
It takes all my discipline to face them calmly.
“Back up to the Chancellor’s office?” I say.
“Not this time,” the one called Brenner says.
Closing in on me from both sides, they herd me in the opposite direction, to the northwest corner of campus.
I see our destination, dark and plain and isolated from every other structure around it: the Prison Tower.
My stomach clenches and my legs go stiff.
Of all the places on campus you don’t want to go, this is the most dreaded.
If you walk through those doors, something has gone very wrong.
This is where they brought Miles Griffin and Ozzy Duncan before Ozzy’s scheduled execution.
